In the processing of meat products, including beef, pork, poultry, fish, etc, meat is removed from the animal carcass manually and/or using machinery. The machinery can be automated or manually operated. Upon completion of meat removal from the carcass, any amount of meat remaining on the carcass has a value far less than the meat removed from the carcass. For example, in the removal of turkey breast meat from the carcass, the breast meat removed with the breast muscle has a value of about ten times the value of breast meat remaining on the carcass.
Food processors seek to maximize production yields and minimize waste. Improvement initiatives have been used to identify and drive efficiency gains. For example, turkey processors track how much meat is left on the turkey “skeleton” (i.e., the turkey “frame”, or “carcass”) before it goes to a lower-value end use than the meat removed from the carcass. If the process of removal of meat is 100% efficient, no meat would remain on the frame, and 100% of the meat originally on the carcass would be present in the form of a high value product separated from the carcass. However, due to inefficiencies in both automated and manual processing of the turkeys, and the real-world challenge of removing all the meat from the carcass both automated machinery and human processors leave a finite amount of meat on the carcass of the animal.
In the past, the efficiency of a food processor's operation has been assessed by manually measuring how much meat is left on the carcass. This is typically done by pulling random samples of products from the processing line and measuring key attributes. For example, to measure the efficiency of a turkey processing line, a processor would want to know how much turkey breast is remaining on the turkey frame before it is discarded. It is not feasible to measure every single turkey, so smaller samples are taken to represent the entire populate of turkeys produced on a given line. To weigh the turkey breast remaining on the frame, the frame is manually scraped of all meat. The scraped meat is weighed and recorded using anything from a pen and paper to an electronic data entry system where the data can be analyzed and reported. Moreover, the results are usually reported 24 to 48 hours after the samples are pulled and scraped. It would be desirable to enhance the efficiency and degree of assessment of meat removal from animal carcasses, to more closely and accurately monitor production yield in an effort to improve production yields and minimize waste.